Despite the fundamental restructuring of European political, ideological and cultural space due to the globalization of modern world, the teaching and research of language, literature and culture at the European universities are still taking place within the framework of national philology. Yet, since the emergence of modern national philology was firmly bound to the emergence of modern nation-states, the dissolution of nation-states under way in the European Union unavoidably brings up the question of the suitability of national philology to the new hybrid situation European languages, literatures and cultures have found themselves in. Already the rise of Cultural and Postcolonial Studies in the last decades of the 20^th century seriously queried the philological concept of literature by depriving the national literary historiography of its self-appointed role as the delegate of national spirit. Within the frame of national philology, authorized allegedly by the nation itself, the ethnically, culturally, socially and/or linguistically marginal groups of given nations were put under hard pressure to leave behind their self-indulgent group interests in order to accept literature as the highest expression of national spirit. Yet, instead of dedicating themselves to the individual and compassionate reading of canonical literary texts, as was envisaged by the philologists, these groups carried on practicing literature in the traditional everyday way that was oriented more towards the affirmation of their collective identities than towards the nation-formation. They experienced nation as a strange and somewhat ghostly substance imposed upon them by racially, ethnically, socially, linguistically and/or culturally foreign elite. In the background of the proclaimed common and uninterested national spirit these minority groups recognized the vested social, political or ideological interests of dominant groups, with whom they had nothing in common, or did not want to have in common.

This resistance to the idea of national literature was however not restricted to the attitude of various minorities engendered within the European nation-states usually as a consequence of their colonial or imperial past. The tight relatedness of the philological concept of literature with the nation-state makes it even more questionable from the perspective of "underdeveloped" European areas in which, for a number of reasons, nation-states have been established with a substantial delay. The peoples of East-Central-European area, for example, were for a long time subjected to the hegemonic interests of their western or eastern rulers. Because of that, they were always part of somebody else’s national project instead of their own. In order to ensure state unity, which they were forced to become a part of, they were firstly obliged to abandon certain aspects of their own traditional identity. Each political uniting in this part of Europe demanded from the participants the discarding of their inherited deep loyalties. In these countries, literature was unavoidably and constantly involved in the historically changing network of social, political, ideological and cultural interests, which is why instead of lasting literary works it created context-bound communication techniques, forms of sociability, subject formations, as well as institutions. It thus reestablished the enlightenment concept of literature, in which literature was just one of many constituent parts of culture and did not stake any world-making claims in the name of universal and all-assimilating national spirit.

In this "anachronistic" attitude toward literature that insists upon its hybrid i.e. aesthetically non-emancipated forms, the East-Central European peoples repeat the gesture of and thereby establish "elective affinities" with the minority groups within the greatest West European nation-states. Both of these entities rely on the hyphenated identity constitutively dependent upon the sovereign Other their Self can only resist to but not dissociate itself from. As soon as they tried to liberate themselves, they winded up entangled in this Other at another level – as for instance in the case of national movements of the East-Central European nations. These attempted to dissociate themselves from their foreign rulers by breaking the resistances within their own national body in the same merciless manner which foreign rulers had earlier demonstrated against them. In other words, no matter how hostile the Other appears to the Self, his behavior patterns have already found their way into this very Self in the course of their long-term cohabitation. It is therefore not only external to the Self, but always already internal, making its disquieting inner part. It is exactly because the peoples of the East-Central European area compulsively tried to expel this disturbing foreign body out of their Self that the ethnocentric xenophobia in this area emerged, characterized by the steady proliferation of enemy images. But the same conclusion might hold for the minority groups within the West European nation-states. Namely, in order to resist this unbearable irritation of the Other from within, both of them introduced the same philological concept of national spirit based on the linguistic, literary and cultural self-sufficiency of the Self, that they have been simultaneously trying to get rid of. Being apparently homogeneous, the idea of national spirit promised liberation from the haunting Other within oneself. But, due to its fundamental inadequacy to the hyphenated identities because of its organic link with "aesthetic epiphanies", it produced devastating consequences in the process of its misguided application.

The idea of this conference is to reverse the perspective. Instead of applying the philological concepts of national spirit, national literature and national language to hyphenated identities, it might be preferable to carefully interrogate these well instituted concepts in the situation of the global proliferation of hyphenated identities not only within Europe but also without it. The question we want to pose is the following: Was philology indeed well in place in the West European nation-states, as they were supposedly free of any disquieting "internal Other" and its subsequent violent externalization in the form of enemy images? Did the process of nation-formation in these countries really proceed in a genuine cosmopolitan spirit of consistent internalization of external Others that gradually transformed the Still-Others into the No-More-Others following the consistent As-Well-As program? Is this West European cosmopolitanism with its generous As-Well-As attitude a clearly proper medicine for the narrow-minded Either-Or logic typical of East-Central European philologies or those developed in various infra-national "minority groups" - or is this cosmopolitanism, on the contrary, just a disguised or invisible nationalism silently raised to a higher and much more influential level? Is the exclusive or aggressive nationalism not probably just a necessary consequence of this inclusive or invisible nationalism, as for example Etienne Balibar has suggested? If yes, within which framework should literature be taught and studied in order to avoid this global supra-nationalism as well as the ferocious infra-national and national reactions to it? Participants are invited to respond to these questions either by particular case studies or general theoretical and methodological soundings.

The official languages of the conference: German and English.